管理層發言
Hi, everyone. Welcome to the DeFi Technologies second quarter 2026 financial review and shareholder call.
I am Curtis Schlaufman, VP of Marketing and Communications. Joining me on the call today are Chief Executive Officer Johan Wattenstrom, Chief Financial Officer Paul Sandor Bozoki, and President Andrew Forson. We will begin with opening remarks from Johan Wattenstrom followed by a review of our second quarter 2026 financial results from Paul. We will then provide an update on growth initiatives and strategic priorities from Andrew Forson, and we will open up for Q&A after that. A mix of retail from the chat and invite analysts to come on and ask questions live. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that statements made during today's call may constitute forward-looking information under applicable securities laws. These statements include, but are not limited to, comments regarding the expected financial performance, business development, strategic initiatives, market expansion, product growth, and future opportunities. Forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and assumptions and are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied. With that, I will turn it over to Johan Wattenstrom.
Thank you, Curtis, and thank you everyone for joining us today. The second quarter was shaped by continued volatility across digital asset markets as lower crypto asset prices affected assets under management, which together with mark-to-market adjustments weighed on our reported financial results. While those market conditions impacted our financial numbers during the quarter, they have not changed our conviction in the long-term opportunity or the progress across the business. Our focus remains on executing our strategy, strengthening the platform and creating long-term value for shareholders. More importantly, the underlying business continues to move in the right direction. Our core business is becoming more scalable and efficient as we invest across our existing businesses, pursue strategic opportunities and advance product innovation. I believe these efforts are strengthening the platform, enhancing our competitive position and expanding our long-term growth opportunities across all the business areas. Valour has listed over 100 ETPs and structured products across multiple exchanges globally, aiming for another 8 more during Q3. During the quarter, Valour generated more than $22.8 million in net inflows reflecting continued customer demand for our product despite the challenging environment for the broader digital asset industry. We view these positive net inflows as an encouraging sign demonstrating continued demand for our product despite the weaker market environment and reinforcing our confidence in the long-term opportunities ahead. Beyond Valour, we continue to broaden our institutional platform and product offering. The launch of our first hedge fund remains a key priority. With all obstacles now removed, we are at days or at worst one to two days from the actual launch. We also expect to expand our arbitrage strategies during the second half of the year with a goal of further strengthening institutional capability and diversifying our revenue streams. The Swedish FSA did not approve our initial issuer structure; we have appealed the decision and are simultaneously working hard to establish an issuer platform in another domicile within the European Union. Those efforts are moving ahead quite quickly. Development of the Valour platform also remains on track for a targeted beta launch in the second half of the year. The initial deployment will focus on bringing our custody capabilities in house, reducing third-party custody costs and improving margins. Over time, the platform is expected to support a broader range of products and services. AI has also become an increasingly important part of our business. We are leveraging AI to improve operational efficiency while developing AI-enabled investment products, which we believe complement our existing product offering and support future growth. From a financial standpoint, the company continues to operate from a position of strength. Our balance sheet and liquidity provide the flexibility to invest through the market cycle, support product innovation, pursue strategic acquisition opportunities, while also maintaining a disciplined approach to capital allocation. Stillman maintained strong momentum in onboarding larger clients and remains on track for a second record year of revenue. As market conditions improve, we believe the business is positioned for asymmetric upside, supported by continued growth in key operating metrics that are not primarily dependent on market volatility. Looking ahead, our priorities remain unchanged. We are focused on expanding our institutional capabilities, broadening our product offering, and building a more diversified business aligned with the long-term growth of digital assets. While near-term market conditions remain challenging, we believe the investments being made today are strengthening the business, expanding our capabilities, and positioning the company to capitalize on the next phase of growth. Our main focus during this market downturn is to aggressively take market share in our core markets. With that, I will turn over to Paul to walk through the financial results.
Thank you, Johan Wattenstrom, and good morning, everyone. I will begin with an overview of assets under management. Average AUM for the quarter was approximately $471.5 million. Quarter-end AUM was approximately $397.2 million. Lower digital asset prices continued to weigh on reported assets under management during the quarter, consistent with conditions across the broader digital asset market. Our effective management fee yield was approximately 1% compared to approximately 1% in the prior period, primarily reflecting the larger weighting of Bitcoin-related products within our AUM, which carry lower or no management fees, as well as continued weakness across many altcoin markets. Within Valour, our effective staking yield of 2.4% also moderated during the quarter, as lower digital asset prices, compression in lending rates for Bitcoin and Ethereum, and changes in the composition of staking assets reduced overall monetization. Client activity remained encouraging despite these market-driven headwinds. Valour generated $22.8 million of net inflows during the quarter, reflecting continued demand for our products despite the broader market environment. These inflows provide a solid foundation for future growth in assets under management as digital asset prices recover. Total revenues for the quarter were $7.8 million compared to $11.2 million in the prior period, reflecting lower average assets under management and unfavorable mark-to-market adjustments on our digital asset holdings, which are recognized through revenue under our broker-dealer accounting structure. Excuse me. The company also maintained a fortress balance sheet, ending the quarter with $60.3 million in cash and cash equivalents, $19.1 million of stretch preferred shares, and our RWA financial assets, $10.4 million of USDT/USDC tokens and $30 million of digital asset treasury holdings for total liquidity of $119.8 million. For clarity for our investors about the obvious drop in our cash balance from Q1, we bought $20 million of MicroStrategy stretch preferred shares for 201 thousand shares to achieve a higher yield on our treasury cash reserves. These preferred shares yield 12% or $1 per month. We also purchased a smaller position in our RWA product. Our short-term US Treasury bill holdings yield approximately 3.5%. These other products yield significantly more. These investments are disclosed on the face of our balance sheet as other investments in fair value through profit and loss. At management, we view these essentially as cash equivalents, but they are not classified as such under IFRS rules. We believe this strong financial position provides the flexibility to continue investing in strategic initiatives while maintaining a disciplined approach to capital allocation. Turning to product activity, we ended the quarter with 102 ETPs and structured products across our platform. We continue to expand our institutional product pipeline and distribution capabilities while advancing several new investment products and fund structures. Stillman Digital maintained an important diversification component of the broader platform. During the first half of 2026, Stillman generated $5.4 million and is on pace for a second year. We remain encouraged by the business' trajectory and its contribution to the overall platform as it paces for a record revenue year. We remind our investors that Stillman revenue growth is not dependent on cryptocurrency prices increasing, but rather on trading volumes and realized trading spreads. Turning to operating expenses: general and admin expenses and fees and commissions, which are our main cash costs, totaled $8 million in the quarter, which represents a $1.6 million reduction from the $9.6 million incurred in Q1 2026. Of these costs, we remain focused on disciplined cost management and continue working towards our targeted annualized cash operating cost structure of $36 to $39 million while continuing to invest in our business. Our bottom-line result was negatively affected by $16.3 million negative mark-to-market adjustments on our venture portfolio as well as our stretch preferred shares. Most of the negative adjustment is from the markdown of our 5% investment in MetaBank to reflect lower AUM and a compression in EV/AUM multiples across a valuation peer group. We are aware of publicly available information that MetaBank has engaged Cantor Fitzgerald to explore a potential public listing for it. With that, I will turn it over to Andrew Forson.
Thank you, Paul. As we discussed last quarter, our focus remains on expanding the institutional capabilities, distribution relationships, and operating infrastructure needed to support the next phase of growth for DeFi Technologies. Throughout the quarter, we made progress across several strategic initiatives designed to broaden our product offering, improve monetization, and expand access to the platform. A key priority remains the development of regulated fund structures and institutional investment products. We are working to bring these initiatives to market in a disciplined manner, with an emphasis on products that are fully operational, commercially ready, and available to investors. An organization like DeFi operates in a complex regulated space which requires the building of trust through relationships. Initiatives often require months and years of work before the results are seen by the general public. In our case, Q2 saw increased adoption by partner organizations globally of our DVO Index platform, which provides a strong narrative to discuss the unique strengths of each product within the Valour platform. Q2 also saw us systematize and execute on approaches for interacting with institutions and onboarding institutional capital into our Valour products. Over 40% of this quarter's inflows are directly attributed to our institutional events and outreach. To give a clear example: deals that began as discussions at our Abu Dhabi event in December 2025 closed during Q2. We have built an institution-focused marketing and outreach strategy that uniquely enables us to communicate the power of our products, the services offered by our portfolio companies, and our pipeline of future products on our terms, efficiently and economically to a global audience of bona fide investors. We built this capacity, which has enabled us to be competitive and generate positive net inflows despite compressed digital asset prices and poor market conditions in less than 12 months. What we have created plays an important role. We finally have an all-important institutional sales platform. The beauty of what we do and how we do it is it is global and flexible enough to accommodate all the innovative products in our pipeline that have been discussed by Johan in a CEO letter and his earlier statement. In science, as in finance, to be effective, we must categorize the factors we deal with as independent or dependent variables. I remain heartened by our team's focus and our company's resilience in unfavorable market conditions. I am bullish on DeFi Technologies, Valour, and Stillman Digital, because we are demonstrating increased efficiency and effectiveness with the dependent variables—these elements we have control over like net inflows, visibility, product development, clarity of the financial story, optimization of our corporate venture holdings. Areas we do not have full autonomy over include asset prices and regulatory approvals, which can be impacted by anything from war, interest rates, holiday seasons, and broader asset prices. We monitor those closely and have a dedicated team that responds quickly and professionally to all requests in an attempt to give ourselves the best shot at success. I ask listeners and viewers to know: when Johan speaks of creating a platform, these are not empty words. He has done it before, and the evidence of this is in our world-leading portfolio of over 100 digital asset underlying ETPs. Now we are entering into a new era of product with the objective of expanding our platform into structured instruments that have the potential for performance-based upside. It is not a question of if these products will be delivered — they will be — and when they come online, many of these products are higher returning with great potential for upside to the firm. These initiatives are important not only because they broaden our product offering, but also because they expand the ways we can monetize the platform. Historically, our revenue model has been driven primarily by assets under management, management fees, and staking income. Over time, we believe these new institutional products and investment strategies can add performance-based returns, institutional mandates, and other revenue streams that are less directly tied to the direction of digital asset markets. Since November 2025, we have worked hard to develop our innovative business intelligence system that provides granular views of key competitive and operational metrics. This has grown into a system of proprietary, data-driven tools that give unique insights as to how specific Valour single or index products interact with the financial world around us. Such research and development efforts leverage our infrastructure to provide unique insights. This serves as a proving ground for potential new products that can be created for third-party asset managers, for deployment by their internal risk desks, or wealth management platforms. This new capability enables us to expand distribution through the provision of valuable insights, enables us to create new institutional partnerships, and improve monetization across products and assets already supported by the business whilst using data to define the products of the future. The positive net inflows generated in Q2 are proof that our model is working, demonstrating the strength of our product offering and our ability to attract institutional and other customer assets through challenging market conditions. We also continue to invest in the long-term capabilities of the platform. As tokenization becomes more widely adopted across financial markets, we believe our technology and operating infrastructure can eventually support a broader range of financial products and asset classes, including tokenized real-world assets. As the new products come online, I am excited that the firm will be in a position to speak with institutional capital allocators worldwide. This is the platform and product diversification that will insulate the company from the exogenous shocks inherent in digital asset markets whilst providing new and larger opportunities for institution-focused revenue generation. That said, our focus is on execution. We will only communicate new products when they are operational and available to investors rather than before the necessary legal, regulatory, and commercial requirements are in place. We believe this approach will strengthen credibility, support durable client relationships, and create more sustainable value for shareholders. With that, I will turn the call back over to Curtis for Q&A.
Thanks, Andrew Forson. First of all, if you are an analyst, please raise your hand and I can invite you on live to chat. I will go through the Q&A chat here for our retail investors. We will start with a couple of questions. First question: When can we expect the smart crypto fund and hedge fund products? How is issuer listing coming along? I think Johan Wattenstrom, if you could give as much color as you can on our upcoming fund structures as a whole.
Yeah, for sure. We have actually much more visibility than we had only a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, it also took, I think, three months to onboard with some key trading partners because of different jurisdictional problems and other things. But now we finally onboarded with everyone. There are no more obstacles for the smart crypto fund. So we are in the final practicalities. So it should be maybe one or two, hopefully in three weeks at most. But I would say it is possible within a week. We have no more actual formal obstacles. Everything is done. We are into practicalities and some final integrations. So we should see that within Q3 for sure. On issuer listing, we unfortunately got a note from the Swedish FSA. They delayed it longer than they actually had legal ground to do, and they actually in the end did not even give a reason. They are quite anti-crypto activists in the Swedish FSA. Since a long time. But we have appealed that decision. We have also redone the application in Sweden just to apply pressure there. We have also come quite far in the Luxembourg structure where they are quite neutral in terms of the different test classes. So if we do not get through in Sweden, we will get through in Luxembourg. But it might unfortunately take a few more months. We cannot give an exact date or clarity. I do not want to promise anything there. But within this year is my hope. If we get through in Sweden, it could go much quicker. So there is uncertainty on issuer listing, but on the hedge fund, we have clarity. We are through all obstacles.
Next question.
分析師問答
Our shares are one-fifth the price that they were when we initiated the capital raise. Should we not utilize some capital at this 80% discount to close out our current buyback? So, again, another question and thoughts around our view on buybacks.
Yeah. I can say what we have said before on that matter: our objective is to use the cash to grow our operation. We have done some investments this quarter to get a higher yield on the cash. But obviously, we want to maintain it ready for some of the deals we continuously are looking at, which we think would have a much higher impact on the stock price if and when we can get those done than to just buy shares back. I also have the opinion that we should primarily buy back shares if we have strong positive cash flow and positive earnings to buy back shares. Obviously, you can do it for other reasons as well. But in a falling market, a market where we see any change in the crypto market so far, I do not think it would have a lasting impact on its own. I think what would have a lasting impact is for us to grow the AUM, launch more products, and do structural deals. So that remains the focus. That is not a no to buybacks; it is just saying that we think we have better opportunities and better use of cash at this point.
And to reemphasize again: when we do buy back shares, those shares are retired. It is not like buying shares on the open market and holding them. Once we utilize that capital, the shares are burned. That capital is then gone. We cannot make it liquid again to go out and buy anything else or reinvest it. From an operating leverage standpoint, especially during a bear market when we are not producing a whole lot of free cash flow, it does not make a whole lot of sense for the long-term revenue capabilities of the company.
Yeah. I think what is best for the stock price long term and what will drive the stock price the most is for us to grow the AUM, grow the revenues, and that remains our full focus with all the resources we have at hand.
And then a couple of questions on the Nasdaq compliance and applying for a 180-day extension. I will address this quickly. We will be applying for the additional 180-day extension on September 1. We have had discussions with the team at Nasdaq. They have indicated that we do qualify for the additional 180-day extension, but they cannot give us an affirmative answer until the application is submitted. We are very optimistic that the extension will be granted. During that time, hopefully crypto winter ends and the company rerates. We will keep all investors apprised as we proceed along this process. The goal here is to get back over $1 organically through our own internal growth initiatives and, quite bluntly, the market coming out of crypto winter and back into a stable run in Bitcoin and some of the other assets. I will answer one more question, then we will go to analysts, and I will keep answering. We will pop back and forth. Now that geographic expansion has slowed and institutional products have stalled in Europe, what does the company see as the biggest driver of AUM outside of increased crypto prices? Andrew or Johan?
Yeah. I can start. I think obviously the new products we are launching now — the new crypto fund, the issuer funds and so forth — address a different market. We have distribution not just locally in our core markets; we have distribution globally for those products. There is a lot of demand and not a lot of products to choose from. I think our products will be unique and address that market in an extremely attractive way. We will also be listing a few innovative new products in the next few months; two of them, hopefully within two weeks, that are unique. There is no competition for those. I do not want to get too explicit about what we are going to list in the next few months; that is something we will announce when we list. But both the institutional fund-type products and the other ETP products we have in our pipeline will be unique and will address a different market than what we are working with right now. There is a lot of untapped potential there, and I think that will really drive our AUM once launched.
Thanks. And then Paul, before we go to Edward, Alan, and Hal, could you clarify the use of capital to purchase the stretch preferreds and the RWA product?
Yeah. Okay. So for everybody to know, we keep our cash in U.S. dollars. We keep our cash in U.S. Treasury bills short-term, three months or less; yields on those are about 3.5%. So it is not great in this environment. The board approved $20 million of our cash pile going to MicroStrategy preferreds — the stretch preferreds, STRCs that I think most people are aware of. We did buy them at $99.50. They went as low as $85 at June 30; I think they were actually in the seventies earlier, but they were $85 on June 30. So we marked it down in the financials that you are seeing today. Those shares have since recovered to approximately $95. Michael Saylor and others have come out publicly repeatedly saying that their goal is to get them back to $100. We will not sell. We do not have any intention to sell our shares in the near term. They are just a higher-yielding component of our treasury. So we do pick up a dollar a share. There is no withholding tax. They are paid as return of capital. We still consider them attractive.
That is cool.
Okay. I will add from Compass Point: Analyst Edward, go ahead and unmute yourself and I will give the floor.
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question here. Do you mind — I know you touched on some of the strength and the net flows being driven by institutional — but just curious: was there any specific product or was it kind of across the spectrum for those net inflows? I know you called out one big sale to Hedera early in the quarter, but it seems even since then things have had a pretty good pace.
Yeah. I can touch on that briefly. There certainly was the $11 million of HBAR, the Hedera, which was a big part of it. And just overall for people to be aware of our AUM: we are 46% Bitcoin and Ethereum and 69.8% Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana. So 70% in three tokens. The growth does generally reflect that. The disproportionate HBAR inflow that we press released is what you are aware of.
Yeah. But even for the $22.8 million of inflows, it is still your best quarter in a while. I'm curious what is driving that: any geography, anything specific, or was that lumpy or generally broad-based?
I can comment on that. It was quite broad. The distribution that Paul mentioned is correct. Over the past year, we have been hammering contacts with broker-dealer platforms and institutional investors, and making sure people are aware of our presence. They see that we are visible. There have been strong marketing and publicity campaigns in the Nordics as well. We have a very granular system for tracking which products money is flowing into and out of, not only for us but for our competitors too. So we are maximizing efficiency, and we were aware that it was a tough market, so we wanted to make sure to squeeze out every last drop of capital into our products to attract capital.
A bit more color on that: behind the scenes, Andrew, Jacob, Johan, and our marketing and sales team at Valour are doing extensive work to grow the brand not only in the Nordics but across the EU. These symposiums and capital market series are where seeds are planted that turn into net inflows and AUM gains. There are many small face-to-face connections that our marketing and sales teams are doing. These are things we were not in a position to do financially a couple of years ago. Even in a crypto winter, with a robust balance sheet, we are able to be aggressive but efficient in our marketing and sales tactics. We ran larger campaigns in the Nordics that attracted additional inflows into our ETPs over the past few months. So even though things are slower in the ecosystem, this is an opportunity for us to be aggressive, grow our brand, plant seeds, and see those fruits when conditions turn.
Great. In the press release you mentioned how in the bear market you guys are well capitalized and there could be potential M&A — obviously, nothing specific — but what are you seeing? Potential deals and sellers here, or is that just a general comment that you might be able to execute on at some point?
Yeah. I can comment briefly. We see a continuous stream and pipeline of potential M&A deals of different kinds. In the last six months it has been much more intense in that regard. We are extremely picky. Even though we have done deep due diligence on some deals that were very close and could have been extremely good, if it is not a perfect fit we do not go ahead. We have done a lot of work on that. We see more and more in the pipe. The M&A space is very active right now and a lot of interesting deals are coming up. We are selectively approaching and looking at new deals. We obviously want to make sure it is a perfect fit for our long-term strategy. It is super exciting and a lot of interesting discussions are being held.
Great. Thanks for the color.
Any other questions? Alan from Maxim, I will invite you now. If you have the floor, go ahead.
Hi, this is Alan. My question is on operating expense that you mentioned in the presentation. Operating expenses fell to about $8 million for the quarter. Is that a reasonable level going forward? With AUM at quarter-end just below $400 million, can you give commentary on breakeven levels now with the lower expense structure?
Thanks for the question, Alan. It is our goal to keep operating cash operating costs — general and admin plus fees and commissions, excluding non-cash share-based compensation — in the $36 to $39 million range. We need about $550 million of AUM at a 4.25% monetization to be breakeven at that level, which we think is a reasonable monetization rate and assumes slightly stronger crypto markets. That is something we continue to monitor and, depending on how long the crypto bear market goes on, we will continue to reevaluate. At the current time, we think that is where we would like to operate.
Right.
Thanks, Paul.
If I could ask a follow-up to Andrew Forson.
Andrew, you mentioned on the inflows that it was approximately 40% from institutions. I want to make sure I heard that number right.
Yes. It was approximately 40%. Actually, it might be higher, but roughly 40% of the Q2 inflows were attributable to deals that began at our events and meetings where we engaged institutions directly. Those particular deals represent approximately 40% of the Q2 inflows. Without these new vectors of communicating and institutional outreach, we may not have been able to close those deals. Using our existing product mix, whenever you factor in that we are creating new products that will be less geographically restricted and have more global appetite, that is where we expect growth in AUM to come from. For instance, some of the fund products Johan discussed have attracted interest from wealth management platforms and institutional allocators outside Europe. They can participate in those quite easily because they have an interesting investment philosophy, attractive Sharpe ratios, and other appealing characteristics. These are products that larger capital allocators outside Europe would have an interest in and would be able to access.
Thank you.
I think, unless Alan comes back, that is all the questions we have from analysts. Alan, are you still there? I have invited you back.
Hi, can you hear me? Sorry about that. I just wanted to check: you said getting back to cash operating expenses, your target is $36 million to $39 million. If I annualize the quarter's general and admin plus fees and commission at just under $8 million, that would annualize to $32 million, which is lower than $36 million to $39 million. Is it reasonable you could run at a lower rate than $36 million to $39 million?
Yeah. You have to look at Q1 which was a little higher, Alan. Hopefully, we do come in at the lower end of the range. We are trying to underpromise and overdeliver here. We are running leaner now.
Okay, good. And regarding yield: the normal assumption for breakeven AUM is using a 4.25% monetization. Is there any reason we should be using a lower yield going forward? You did 5% in 2025 and 3.6% in Q1. Bitcoin was $58.3k on June 30. Any update on that assumption?
I mean, personally I think it is tough right now in crypto. We are hopeful the cycle improves in the fall; if Bitcoin can get closer to its 200-day moving average, yields will come up. The yields right now are extremely distressed. We are still internally budgeting at 4.25%. If you use a lower yield, it pushes the breakeven up, but you can see we are aggressive on costs and trending on the low end as well.
The dynamic here is when markets go down, Bitcoin dominance normally goes up, so our higher-yielding assets become a lower part of the AUM, which drives down the average monetization rate. Even though we are more efficient in getting higher monetization rates on single assets across the board, the product mix changes when the market goes down: Bitcoin and Ethereum become a larger percentage. That is what drives the average monetization rate down in the bear market. That obviously reverses when the market goes up; in prior cycles, alts come back with a high beta and then monetization increases.
This is very helpful. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Alan. With that, we will go ahead and wrap it up. If we were not able to get to your questions, please email IR@DeFi.tech. Thank you all for your time, your patience, and your commitment as shareholders. We value that greatly. We will see you next time, everyone. Thank you.